Ester Krumbachová and Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer (1969)
Makedonikon Cinema, Thessaloniki
Thursday 12 March 2026 at 5:30 PM
Greek and English subtitles
As part of “Anarchiving change”, a conversation between Thessaloniki Biennale for Contemporary Art “everything must change. RIS9” curated by Nadja Argyropoulou and TiDF and its 2026 theme: archives.
Witchhammer will be presented along with the film Le Sibille (Italy, 1977) by the pioneering trans-feminist collective Le Nemesiache, with a short preface by the curator of the tribute on the representation of witches in art and their persecution in real life, both historically and in the modern context of capitalist accumulation, colonial tradition and punishment of deviant bodies.
The film Witchhammer (Czechoslovakia, 1969) is an example of the multidimensional practice of the largely unrecognized Czech filmmaker and artist Ester Krumbachová whose work and legacy concerns Biennale 9 more broadly.
In this film, based on a book by Václav Kaplický and borrowing its title from the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the medieval witch-hunting manual, Krumbachová was responsible for the production design, co-wrote the screenplay (with director Otakar Vávra), and wrote the lyrics of the war song “Flandern in Not”. The film revives – drawing an inventive connection with the “show trials” and regime propaganda in 1950s Czechoslovakia – the historical reality of one of the last witch trials in Europe of the Middle Ages.
As we read in the archives of Krumbachová, her belief in “free art addressed to free people” is confirmed.
The screening is organized in collaboration with the Ester Krumbachová Archive and the National Film Archive, Prague.